From: Guido A.J. Stevens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>This does pose an interesting challenge to us as
>web-consultants. Business is all about trust. How do we enable our
>clients to establish trust with their prospects? A web site is brand,
>it could have been put up by a respectable company or be a total
>scam. Which means brand is all that's left to judge it upon. And where
>does that put the myriad of small businesses that don't have the money
>to build a large brand?
This is the same problem that small restaurants face in competition with the
large chains. McDonalds is a brand. It's the same everywhere. One knows what
one is getting at McDonalds: the very same (tasteless) burger that one got
at the last McDonalds. You can count on it.
But a great little Greek restaurant or a Persian restaurant or many other
small restaurants can't compete because people won't try them. Small
restaurants simply don't have the traffic that a burger chain can attract.
Thus the chains dominate the suburban American landscape. This also goes for
many other things: Levi jeans, Coke, and so on.
I hate to say this, but I suspect that the web is going to lead to a vast
homogenizing and centralizing of business.
We simply don't need tens of thousands of web sites that are selling the
same thing. It's idiotic to buy a product from a manufacturer, mark it up,
and resell it over the web. You have your employees, office, salaries, etc.,
and you mark it up 30%; some goofball kid in Nebraska will mark it up 3%. He
lives at home, doesn't pay rent or salaries, and for him, 3% is fun money.
With search engines and comparative price sites, such as www.shopper.com,
buyers can find the lowest prices. At 1% and 2% markups, no one can survive.
The only way to sell on the net is to sell something to which you have
exclusive distribution rights. Web retail is another dead web trend.
It's going to kill the mom-and-pop (or two dudes and a Pentium) web sites.
If they can't get their legal hands on original, unique content, they'll get
wiped out.
Manufacturers are realizing that they don't need retailers. Gateway, Dell,
and Apple are all selling custom-built computers directly to their customers
over the web. Airlines will sell directly to their customers and cut the
travel agencies out. It won't take long for car manufacturers to set up a
web site where one can select all of the goodies for your car and have the
thing delivered to your door.
___________________________________________________
Andreas Ramos [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.andreas.com
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